Levi's Stadium Guide: Purdy - Fans, welcome to the South Bay and get ready for a ride

When entering Levi's Stadium for the first time, you may experience a jarring sensation. Perhaps a bit of vertigo.

Do not be concerned. You're simply encountering the altered landscape of Bay Area sports, tilting on its axis southward.

One side effect of this geographic modification: More people in San Francisco and the East Bay will discover that the local freeways actually do work in both directions.

Another side effect: Nothing will ever quite be the same again in the Northern California athletic marketplace.

You think that's an overstatement? Wait a couple of years, after the 49ers' new home not only plays host to the team's home games, but to the Super Bowl, big college football games, Wrestlemania, soccer matches with the world's best club teams, whatever. Then get back to me.

And yes, people in Santa Clara are excited about their new big and shiny landmark.

"When people ask where Silicon Valley is, this is the picture they will show," said the city's mayor, Jamie Matthews, on ribbon-cutting day as he gestured at the stadium behind him.

Matthews might be right about that, although the network "beauty shots" coming out of commercials will almost surely still feature the Golden Gate Bridge, almost 50 miles away.

That's understandable. But it is also not the complete picture. For instance, the aerial cameras at some point might want to show the Santa Clara University campus courtyard where in 1928, two underclassmen named Tony Morabito and Al Ruffo first met during a game of keepaway played with a football. They stayed fast friends after graduation and in 1945 decided to start up a pro football team. Morabito, a lumber man, provided the cash. Ruffo, a lawyer, drew up the legal papers. The 49ers were born, featuring the same uniform colors as Santa Clara U football teams.

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Sixty-nine years later, Santa Clara County possesses the first-ever California stadium ever built expressly for an NFL team, the most modern and largest professional outdoor sports venue in the region. That means the South Bay will now be home to the country's biggest sports events. That will include Super Bowl 50 in February 2016 and undoubtedly World Cup futbol when the event returns to the USA. So instead of facing an hourlong commute to San Francisco or Oakland for NFL games, South Bay residents will watch others make that drive in reverse.

This is the part where I pat myself on the back. In 2006, when skeptics were saying the 49ers would never leave San Francisco, I pushed the Santa Clara idea that was originally touted by former City Council member Kevin Moore. In 2009, before the Santa Clara City Council had even moved to put the stadium to a public ballot measure, I wrote a column predicting the stadium would open in 2014.

And hey, here we are. All right, end of back-patting. I'm happy to have been proven correct. There are three ways to look at what's really happened here:

1. The 49ers' move south is nothing more than a sensible rebalancing and recalibration. Santa Clara County has long had the largest population of the nine Bay Area counties. It made no sense that most of region's pro teams played elsewhere.

Now, with the opening of Levi's Stadium, the six major Bay Area pro sports franchises -- 49ers, Raiders, Giants, A's, Warriors and Sharks -- will soon be equally divided among the three population centers. When the Warriors occupy their planned new San Francisco arena, that city will be home to the NBA franchise and the Giants.

The Raiders and A's will remain in Oakland and the East Bay, assuming their stadium pursuits both reach fruition. San Jose and the South Bay will be home to the Sharks and 49ers. (If you wish, you can include the Earthquakes as a third major team, with a new soccer-specific stadium being constructed near Mineta San Jose International Airport.)

2. Rebalancing, phooey. The 49ers' move south is primarily and brutally all about the ongoing Silicon Valley takeover of Bay Area sports.

3. A combination of the two.

I tend to go with the third option. But there's one irrefutable piece of evidence to demonstrate conclusively that 49ers owner John York and his son, Jed, were correct to put their faith in the South Bay market when they couldn't reach a deal in San Francisco and looked to a parking lot outside the Great America theme park for salvation.

Theoretically, it was a risk. This is easily the farthest distance that any NFL team has ever built a venue from its "home" city. Levi's Stadium is 43.5 miles from San Francisco City Hall. (Next on that list is the New England Patriots' Gillette Stadium, which is 29 miles from downtown Boston.)

And yet, in spite of all those miles, the 49ers retained 70 percent of their season ticket base from Candlestick Park -- and then sold out the remaining Levi's Stadium seats at prices the size of car payments.

Which tells me that (A) many of those 70 percent were already from the South Bay and (B) the Silicon Valley tribe was more than ready to snarf up the rest.

Which should be no surprise. Need we remind you? There are more Fortune 500 companies in Santa Clara County than in San Francisco and Alameda counties combined. The valley's percentage of millionaires is higher than in San Francisco. Levi's Stadium is full of corporate branding, with company logos abounding. It's kind of a concrete version of a NASCAR drivers' uniform.

It is also why A's owner Lew Wolff was so eager to move his team to San Jose, the Bay Area's largest city and self-proclaimed "Capital Of Silicon Valley," before Major League Baseball squashed the idea at the behest of the Giants.

San Jose might have also been the natural place for the 49ers to look when seeking a stadium site. But instead, Santa Clara stepped into the breach because the city had an unbeatable asset: The available land in an accessible location.

It took 819 days to build Levi's Stadium, utilizing 7,788 workers and the reported $1.3 billion. It's going to take about five minutes for paying customers to understand that the finished product might well be worth the cost.

Of course, I am assuming here that the traffic/parking and light-rail glitches from the Aug. 2 "soft opening" soccer game will be fixed in time for the first 49ers' exhibition game -- or at the very least by the first regular season game, on Sept. 14. There's no reason the traffic shouldn't be far better than Candlestick, when roughly 8 bajillion cars had to cram their way in and out of just two freeway exits to reach the stadium. By comparison in Santa Clara, there are 13 freeway entrance/exit points, plus 12,000 more parking spaces than at Candlestick, plus two rail lines.

There's no way things were going to be 100 percent perfect out of the gate, and they definitely weren't. Also, until 49ers season ticket holders travel to the stadium, there's no way to know exactly from which direction most will arrive. They've been given directions with their parking passes. But many people don't follow directions -- as occurred when fans for the soccer game showed up with purses even though the 49ers notified ticket buyers that most purses were not permitted in the stadium under NFL rules. Also, there was no way to know how many fans would ride the VTA trains to the game until it happened. And that obviously became a big problem. But anybody can look at a map and see that the road infrastructure should be able to facilitate the number of game-day vehicles expected.

"You have to realize that every weekday, over 100,000 people move in and out of the stadium area to go to work," Matthews said. "So the street grid can handle this. We're going to have some hiccups along the way. That's inevitable. But we've got the best people in the business working on it."

Will people from all around the Bay Area buy into the Levi's effect? Will they embrace the New Northern California Sports World Order? My prediction is that the out-of-county types will squawk for a while, then come around when they see what the new stadium is like.

A most comical development in the stadium process involved Cedar Fair, the Great America proprietor. Cedar Fair initially fought like crazy against the stadium because it was supposedly "not compatible" with the theme park's operations. By this summer, Great America had signed on as the "official amusement park of 49ers" and had built a pregame "Red Zone Rally Pavilion" on their property that will provide food and beverages at the smooth price of $85 per person per game.

In other words, "not compatible" had become "not wanting to be left out." Yes, just another side effect of the axis tilt. Attention to those outside the 408 area code: Get used to it. You'll be watching 49ers games in Santa Clara for a long, long time.